college textbooks

<p>For those of you with children already in college, where do they buy their textbooks? Do they use the campus bookstore, or buy online?
If any of you have good online resouces, I would appreciate it.</p>

<p>I bought all my textbooks through <a href="http://www.half.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.half.com&lt;/a> It is an EBay run service, but usually the prices could not be beat. Do NOT buy any books through the bookstore, it is a complete ripoff!</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=88308%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=88308&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I just bought 3 textbooks online. My son's college gave him a list of required textbooks with ISBN numbers and new and used (if available) prices at the bookstore. Much to my surprise the Amazon new price was $1 or $2 MORE than the bookstore new price! The bestbookbuys.com website is incredibly useful because it lists prices from a variety of sources and includes an estimated shipping fee, so you are looking at the "all-in" cost of the book. In several cases the cheapest price was from an Amazon used bookseller. I purchased the 3 textbooks thru Amazon from 3 different used booksellers. The other texts we will try to pick up used at the college bookstore. :)</p>

<p>oh, here is one example:
new price at college bookstore: $85.15
best used price (Amazon) $20.49</p>

<p>last 3 prices on the page listing from lowest to highest: $93.86, $94.73, and $118.35!!</p>

<p>I usually use classbook.com for our textbooks and have gotten some very good prices there.</p>

<p>Yes, online can be a lot cheaper for rental, used and even digital textbooks. But there’s no one site that is cheapest. In fact has inventory levels change so do the site prices. A textbook price comparison service like cheap-textbooks.com or one of the others (Google textbook price comparison) the shoyu everybody’s prices in a single report. Makes it very easy to compare rental versus used and online versus the college bookstore.</p>

<p>If you have the isbn number run it through dealoz. It shows the prices from all the websites (amazon, half.com, textbooks.com etc).</p>

<p>We buy nearly all our books used online. It has saved us a fortune.</p>

<p>I have had to buy S’s textbooks since middle school and thought I had it down. But, in his first year of college he has been required to buy the newest version of an etext that “supposedly” is cutomized for his school for one class and a three book package also cutomized with a specific ISBN for his school only. I found it very discouraging. His other books I was able to obtain cheaply through online sources. One professor even sent S and email telling him to get the cheapest version of the book he could find. Hopefully, the trend does not continue throughout his college career and there are no more customized versions required. And to be honest I am not sure exactly how different these customized versions are from all the rest.</p>

<p>My daughter has had a few of those. It is really annoying. Her calc class they had to buy a customized loose leaf version that covered 3 semesters of calc and came with 3 semesters of online access. it was very expensive, probably her most expensive book. She, like many students, was only doing one semester of calc. And as the book was loose leaf it could not not be resold. Biggest rip off ever. Really left us feeling the school was trying to gouge the students with that one. The regular version was available used online at a substantial saving. As far as we could tell there was little difference. And the math department tried to feed the students some guff that they did the customized version to save the students money.</p>

<p>My tax prof was great about telling us every possible way to save money on books. We need two books. tax laws change every year, so buying used does not really work. She strongly recommended the online version of the one that needed to be the current version, and suggested the prior year version for the other (a huge code book). SHe tells us what to update in the code book.</p>

<p>My d likes renting her books.</p>

<p>My D is a freshman & we bought most of her books from Amazon’s used - book vendors, except the annoying customized computer scie. book with its pricey access code. What a ripoff. And the writing prof <em>insisted</em> the latest edition of the writing book was the only one that could possibly do.</p>

<p>same as JRZMom, D also uses Amazon’s used book vendors. If the price is comparable, she chooses “filled by Amazon” vendors to save the shipping and two days delivery with Prime membership. She is Sophomore, this is the 4th quarter she has used Amazon’s used and she hasn’t have any bad experience yet. Only when the book aren’t available from Amazon new or used, she would use her bookstore.</p>

<p>In a few cases, the custom edition at the campus bookstore is much less expensive than the regular edition elsewhere (the Berkeley custom version of Stewart’s Calculus 6th edition is an example).</p>

<p>In a few other cases, the book is legally free to read on the web:</p>

<p>[Structure</a> and Interpretation of Computer Programs](<a href=“http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html]Structure”>http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html)
[Lee</a> and Varaiya, Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems](<a href=“http://leevaraiya.org/]Lee”>http://leevaraiya.org/)
[url=&lt;a href=“http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html]Book[/url”&gt;http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html]Book[/url</a>]</p>